ole herd is driven a mile or more to a
suitable pool in the creek, and one by one doused and washed and
rinsed in the water. We used to wash below an old grist-mill, and it
was a pleasing spectacle,--the mill, the dam, the overhanging rocks
and trees, the round, deep pool, and the huddled and frightened
sheep.

One of the features of farm life peculiar to this country, and one
of the most picturesque of them all, is sugar-making in the maple
woods in spring. This is the first work of the season, and to the
boys is more play than work. In the Old World, and in more simple
and imaginative times, how such an occupation as this would have got
into literature, and how many legends and associations would have
clustered around it! It is woodsy, and savors of the trees; it is an
encampment among the maples. Before the bud swells, before the grass
springs, before the plow is started, comes the sugar harvest. It is
the sequel of the bitter frost; a sap-run is the sweet good-by of
winter. It denotes a certain equipoise of the season; the heat of
the day fully balances the frost of the night. In New York and New
England, the time of the sap hovers about the vernal equinox,
beginning a week or ten days before, and continuing a week or ten
days after. As the days and nights get equal, the heat and cold get
equal, and the sap mounts. A day that brings the bees out of the
hive will bring the sap out of the maple-tree. It is the fruit of
the equal marriage of the sun and the frost. When the frost is all
out of the ground, and all the snow gone from its surface, the flow
stops. The thermometer must not rise above 38 deg. or 40 deg. by day, or
sink below 24 deg. or 25 deg. at night, with wind in the northwest; a
relaxing south wind, and the run is over for the present. Sugar
weather is crisp weather. How the tin buckets glisten in the gray
woods; how the robins laugh; how the nuthatches call; how lightly
the thin blue smoke rises among the trees! The squirrels are out of
their dens; the migrating water-fowls are streaming northward; the
sheep and cattle look wistfully toward the bare fields; the tide of
the season, in fact, is just beginning to rise.

Sap-letting does not seem to be an exhaustive process to the trees,
as the trees of a sugar-bush appear to be as thrifty and as
long-lived as other trees. They come to have a maternal,
large-waisted look, from the wounds of the axe or the auger, and
that is about all.

In my sugar-makin